Student Portfolio   Portfolios: Tools for Teachers and Students Synopsis: Traditionally, student achievement has been measured through standardized and teacher-created tests. There is a testing mentality in all areas of our educational system, and there's not much research supporting the effectiveness of using tests as a vehicle for evaluating student achievement. In fact, the use of tests is commonly criticized: tests do not necessarily measure what students have learned tests do not reveal what students have achieved some teachers spend inordinate amounts of instructional time "teaching for the test" students seem to remember little shortly after taking tests tests are inaccurate at predicting student success in the future Since the late 1980's, Portfolios have been discussed as a possible alternative to traditional forms of assessment. Some colleges in the east are now accepting student portfolios in lieu of S.A.T. or A.C.T. scores. Today's portfolios are derived from the visual and performing arts in which they have served a long tradition to showcase artists' accomplishments and personally favored works. Now they're being generalized to the sciences, humanities, social sciences, and almost every academic discipline. Although portfolios have the appearance of being a more satisfying form of assessment for both students and teachers, they have unresolved issues. The following seminar attempts to address these questions and issues: What are student portfolios? What is the theoretical grounding of portfolios? What is included in a portfolio? How do teachers use a portfolio to evaluate student learning? What are some of the benefits of portfolio assessment? What are some of the drawbacks or unresolved issues of portfolio assessment? Who is working in the field of portfolio assessment? Where can I find more information? WHAT ARE STUDENT PORTFOLIOS? Portfolios are collections of selected pieces of work representing an array of the student's performance. Student portfolios vary widely in content and purpose and even in who decides what goes into the portfolio. A portfolio might be a folder containing a student's best pieces and the student's evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of those pieces. Else, a portfolio may contain one or more works in progress illustrating how a product, such as an essay, evolved through stages of writing. The student creating the collection mostly makes decisions abo t what goes into the portfolio but decisions almost always involve teachers and peers. THEORETICAL GROUNDING OF PORTFOLIOS Although instructional theory is uninteresting to most, understanding the theoretical grounding of the portfolio movement is a necessary prerequisite to understanding the strength portfolios may offer to teachers and students. Andy Carvin's web site, EdWeb: Exploring Technology and School Reform, explains it well. "By the 1980's, the research of Dewey and Vygotsky had blended with Piaget's work in developmental psychology into the broad approach of constructivism. The basic tenet of constructivism is that students learn by doing rather than observing. Students bring prior knowledge into a learning situation in which they must critique and re-evaluate their understanding of it. This process of interpretation, articulation, and re-evaluation is repeated until they can demonstrate their comprehension of the subject. Constructivism often utilizes collaboration and peer criticism as a way of provoking students to reach a new level of understanding. Active practice is the key of any constructivist lesson. To make an analogy, if you want to learn how to ride a bike, you don't pick a book on bicycle theory - you get on the bike and practice it until you get it right. It is this repetition of practice and review that leads to the greatest retention of knowledge." Moreover, Constructivists believe learning involves engaging students around long-term, meaningful and authentic [real-world] tasks were social discourse, reflection and self-directed learning play central roles. In constructivist classrooms, learning is self-directed [albeit teacher-guided], and therefore, both teachers and students share the documentation of learning. For example, Archaeotype is a curriculum created by faculty at New York City's Dalton School. The curriculum was designed to teach sixth-graders about archaeology and Greek history by asking students to role-play 4collaborative groups of archaeologists in a computer-guided dig. In the curriculum, students explore a computer simulated field site, under which artifacts are buried. Across several weeks of study, students work together to uncover artifacts, formally describe and record vital information, research the meaning of artifacts, and generate hypotheses regarding the nature of the original setting. The curriculum takes weeks to complete, and students are encouraged to conduct research at local libraries and correspond via email with archeologists who've agreed to support the curriculum. Throughout the curriculum, students are compiling their thoughts and idea in field journals, at the end of each week, all 4 groups meet to conduct "finding reports" [which are video taped], they write formal research reports, and so on. All of these materials [written and video taped speeches, field notes, and written reports] are collected and represent the students' portfolio. WHAT IS INCLUDED IN A PORTFIOLIO? Student portfolios are a compendium of selected work in any format (visual, verbal, video, written, electronic, etc.) that reflects learning and growth. Likewise, student portfolios almost always include a component of written reflection on the materials represented in the portfolio, and portfolios are maintained over time-usually years. It is important to note that a portfolio does not consist of a complete collection of a student's entire output but that it represents an accurate sampling of that student's achievement across subjects and across time. Typical portfolios include these elements: student selected pieces, teacher selections or even team projects: reports, essays, videos, artwork, photographs, charts, or journals, even tests things a letter of reflection describing portfolio materials, rational of selections, and learning/growth some portfolio reviews involve an oral defense teacher evaluation of products HOW DO TEACHERS EVAULATE STUDENT PORTFOLIOS? Generally, after learning objectives are clearly defined, rubrics [or rating sheets] are used to score products [students often assist in the creating of the rating sheets], and the goals of evaluation are multiple where products may be evaluated to document the satisfying of a curriculum outcome a process the student has taken learning or growth in a previously defined area a range of repertoire the student's problem areas work that has special importance to the student an overall best product Evaluating a portfolio requires time, skill, and practice. The intricacies involved in this issue alone are numerous, so numerous, the next faculty development seminar is devoted entirely to this topic. WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF PORTFOLIOS? Research shows that students at all levels view assessment as something that is done to them on their class work by someone else. Beyond letter grades, many students have little knowledge of what is involved in evaluating their work. Portfolios provide structure for involving students in their own learning because they're responsible for making decisions of how their learning is to be measured. Instead, portfolios capitalize on students' natural tendency to save work and becomes an effective way to get them to take a second look and think about how they could improve future work. This method is a clear departure from the old write, hand in, and forget mentality, where first drafts are considered final products. When students are involved in selecting pieces for evaluation, they become more interested in their own work and learning. Also, portfolios are integrally tied to constructivist ideology where instruction focuses on engaging students in meaningful learning, meaningful problems. It's an instructional paradigm that engages students in activities that are likely to result in products worthy of sharing with others. Assessment then becomes a process of chronicling student work and opening a new channel for substantive communication between students and teachers that focus on that individual's work. According to the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing [CRESST], "The benefits of portfolios assessment compared to traditional standardized testing are many: By showing what they can do through their portfolios, students demonstrate skills and competencies for teachers, parents, policy makers.. They provide valuable information useful in evaluating the quality of education and quality of student achievement. Focused on the products of classroom instruction, portfolio assessment can be integrated with instruction, not added on. Portfolios target the assessment of complex thinking, deep understanding and the application of knowledge rather than testing isolated skills and knowledge such as memorization of dates, facts & formulas. Because portfolios offer students a wide variety of ways to demonstrate what they know and can do, students are encouraged to become reflective learners responsible for their own learning. Portfolios offer teachers opportunities to understand what students are learning and support their efforts to design appropriate instruction that can increase achievement." WHAT ARE THE DRAWBACKS OF PORTFOLIOS? First of all, because portfolios were a natural derivation to a particularly instruction paradigm -- constructivism -- teachers would have to adopt this approach to classroom instruction if portfolios were to succeed. This alone, especially at school-aged levels, would require substantive changes in policy that included major efforts at communicating this ideology with parents, students, teachers, administrators, and policymakers. Second, research shows that portfolios place additional demands on teachers and students as well as on school resources. Teachers need not only a thorough understanding of their subject area and instructional skills, but also additional time for planning, conferring with other teachers, developing strategies and materials, meeting with individual students and small groups, and reviewing and commenting on student work. Pragmatically, teachers may need extra space in their classrooms to store portfolios or expensive equipment such as video cameras. Third, there are many issues evolving around the reliability and validity of portfolio assessment. Portfolios are truly difficult to evaluate with consistency and many question the validity of the outcome. In fact, the online educator's magazine, Education Week, has multiple articles that question the use of student portfolios [and they're not alone]: Portfolio Folly Even as Popularity Soars, Portfolios Encounter Roadblocks RAND Study Finds Serious Problems in Vt. Portfolio Program Finally, the use of portfolios would require an open, national discussion about the merits of this type of assessment; after all, tests are ingrained in the American educational system and the believers of the SAT and ACT are many and vocal. WHO IS WORKING IN THE FILED OF PORTFIOLIO ASSESSMENT? Winfield Cooper is editor of the quarterly Portfolio News, a publication of the Portfolio Assessment Clearinghouse. Portfolio News provides 20 to 30 pages of articles, project briefs, and other materials by teachers, project directors, and researchers about local and state portfolio projects. It also serves as an information exchange for people interested in portfolios. PROPEL is a continuation of ARTS PROPEL, a cooperative research project involving the Pittsburgh Public Schools, Harvard Project Zero, and Educational Testing Service (ETS). Throughout both stages of the project, portfolios have been used along with classroom observations and external assessments to assess teaming in three content areas--imaginative writing, music, and the visual arts. Information on the PROPEL/ARTS PROPEL approach is now available from ETS in four handbooks--a general overview handbook and one for each of the three content areas. The handbooks describe program and teacher strategies and illustrate student production, perception, and reflection in projects that extend over time. Maryl Gearhart of CRESST is investigating two collaborative research projects involving portfolios in elementary schools. One project involves analyzing issues and problems encountered when teachers use a scoring rubric, originally developed for writing assessments, to score writing collections in student portfolios. Gearhart and her co researchers called for strategies that "balance the tension between evaluators' needs to constrain and structure portfolios for assessment and teachers' needs to devise portfolio uses that ensure their discretion in curriculum." In the second project, Gearhart is documenting the impact of mathematics portfolios on instructional methods and students' learning and motivation. Richard P. Mills is commissioner of education in Vermont, where fourth and eighth grade students are being assessed in writing and mathematics using three methods: a portfolio, a best piece from the portfolio, and a set of equivalent performance tasks. Even as the results from the first year of implementation are being analyzed, the program is being expanded. Lauren Resnick and Marc Tucker are co directors of the New Standards Project, which has embarked on a process to develop a new assessment system to support world-class standards of performance for all students. The system employs advanced forms of performance assessment, such as portfolios, exhibitions, projects, and timed performance examinations. Among its partners are the following states: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington. Where can I get more information? Winfield Cooper PORTFOLIO NEWS Portfolio Assessment Clearinghouse San Dieguito Union High School District 710 Encinitas Boulevard Encinitas, CA 92024 PROPEL/ARTS PROPEL Pittsburgh Public Schools 341 South Bellefield Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Dale Carlson California Department of Education 721 Capitol Mall Sacramento, CA 95814 (916) 657-3011 ARTS PROPEL Educational Testing Service 18-R Princeton, NJ 08541 Ron Dietel National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST)/UCLA 145 Moore Hall 405 Hilgard Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90024-1522 (310) 206-1532 Richard P. Mills Commissioner of Education Vermont Department of Education Montpelier, VT 05602 (802) 828-3135 New Standards Project Learning, Research and Development Center University of Pittsburgh 3939 O'Hara Street, Room 408 Pittsburgh, PA 15260 (412) 624-8319 Larry Rudner ERIC Clearinghouse/AIR 3333 K Street NW, Suite 300 Washington, DC 20007 (202) 342-5060 Joe McDonald Coalition of Essential Schools Brown University Box 1969 Providence, RI 02912 (401) 863-3384 Ed Roeber Council of Chief State School Officers 1 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Suite 700 Washington, DC 20001-1431 (202) 336-7045 Don Chambers National Center for Research in Mathematical Sciences Education University of Wisconsin at Madison 1025 West Johnson Street Madison, WI 53706 (608) 263-4285 References: National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing [CRESST]. Portfolio Assessment and High Technology. David Sweet, Education Research CONSUMER GUIDE--a series published for teachers, parents, and others interested in current education themes. Andy Carvin's web site, EdWeb: Exploring Technology and School Reform   Discover | Read | Explore | Apply | Measure

 

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